


429. fairytale horrors

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [268]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 09:49:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10435062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Sarah keeps having the strangest dreams.(Spoilers for the OB mobile game!)





	

**Author's Note:**

> I reached the ending of the mobile game today, as far as I know, and [I was affected by it.](http://sharkodactyl.tumblr.com/post/158796497669)
> 
> [warning: reference to self-harm scars & suicide]

Sarah keeps having the strangest dreams.

Sometimes she’s Beth, and sometimes she’s MK, and sometimes she’s Helena in the dark glitching basement of the Neolution club, but it always ends the same way: Helena sheds her skin and lunges for Sarah, the angriest angel she’s ever seen.

No, that’s not true. The dream always ends like this: Sarah shoots her, and Sarah wakes up.

It’s jarring to come back to reality. Helena has discovered Snapchat and she keeps sending Sarah selfies from the woods, pictures of nice flowers, a weird craft she made out of bird feathers and eager amounts of hot glue. In Sarah’s dream Helena is all-black, like Sarah’s shadow, scribbled-up scar-red wings flaring out of her back and scratching their way through the air. Sometimes she rips Sarah apart; sometimes it’s even on purpose. When she does she lets out a sigh, gas leak, death by breathing in.

Sarah dreams: she is MK in the woods, running. All the leaves have stick figures scrawled on them. Helena sits tucked between the branches like an owl, watching her, and then they’re back in the warehouse.

“Sarah,” Helena sighs, words like a musicbox shoved in the space where her teeth should be. “We make a family, yes?”

 _I don’t want this_ , Sarah tells her, only when she opens her mouth all that comes out is “I’ve already got a family.”

Helena’s eyes are a blank red, like a kid with only one crayon trying to draw looking. She doesn’t blink. She has no mouth to open, just black empty space.

 _Wait_ , Sarah tells her, only it comes out like this: bang.

\--

“You aren’t sleeping,” Helena tells her, the second Facetime finishes glitching its way towards their call. Helena leans in too close to the screen, so that her eye fills the whole camera lens. Then she leans back. She frowns.

“Bad dreams,” Sarah says. “Nothing to worry about, promise. How’re you doin’ out there?”

“What are your dreams,” Helena says, stubbornly avoiding Sarah’s attempt to change the subject.

“It’s – nothing,” Sarah says. “Been through a lotta shit this year, yeah? It all gets mixed up in my head. I’m fine.”

“If you eat,” Helena says, “that helps. If you go to bed hungry sometimes the dreaming is worse.”

“Great,” Sarah says, “thanks.”

Helena frowns. “That was not helping.”

“No,” Sarah says. “No, no, that’s great, I – forget to eat sometimes, y’know. I’ll eat a granola bar or somethin’. Maybe that’ll help.”

“Sweet dreams, _sestra_ ,” Helena tells her.

“Hope so,” Sarah says.

\--

When Helena’s weight collides with her it _scratches_ , like being hit with an armful of steel wool. Sarah goes down on her back. She’s surrounded by smaller nightmares, men in prison uniforms and men with tails and men that follow her footsteps with dogged weight. Helena doesn’t even scream when she kills them, but she does. They fall apart under the weight of her wings like she’s the only real thing in the world.

Helena lands in front of her in a crouch. Her eyes are so blank. The edges of her are so sharp. She tilts her head to the side, plays back: “Sorry. Mother isn’t very well.”

 _What do you want_ , Sarah asks her, only: “You killed her.”

Helena sighs, an empty hiss. Static. The space on a recording where a voice should be, where a voice can’t find the words at all.

\--

She always wakes up with a jolt, like she’s fallen from a great height.

\--

Sarah on her back on the ground. Helena looming over her. Tonight Sarah dreamed she was herself, following Helena through tumbled-down brick and candlelight and bloody handprints smeared fluorescent red on the walls. They were going to Maggie’s apartment. But now they’re here, and Helena’s wings keep beating but she isn’t going anywhere.

Sarah’s fingers are tight around the gun, and Helena is chewing her way through the whole speech again: scientists, babies, splitting. With effort Sarah unclenches her fingers from the gun. It clatters to the ground.

“I’ve already got a family,” Sarah tells her, and she stands up. She opens her mouth to say something else but there isn’t anything else she can say. Static-hiss. Helena rocks back onto her feet; her wings flap; her eyes are wide, wide. Sarah takes a step forward and Helena blares static at her and

Sarah wakes up with a jolt, like she’s falling and she’s only just now hit bottom.

\--

Beth walks into the light of the train and her shadow stretches and it’s Helena. Of course it’s Helena – Helena climbing out of Beth’s shadow with her wings sketched out red and aching behind her. Sarah watches the blue of the train station bleed red, watches all the walls collapse. She and Helena scribble their way out of the walls, stick figures, the two of them holding hands over and over again.

“Sorry,” Helena tells her, and then stops. Her face is just a shadow. There is nothing in it but a shadow. She rolls her flat black head on her flat black neck, shoulders flexing. “Mother isn’t very well,” she adds.

“You killed her,” Sarah says, and takes a step closer.

“She separated us,” Helena says, wavering on her feet. Behind her her wings flap, but they’re just scars slashed out in the air and so they don’t even stir a breeze. She doesn’t move. “She tore us apart. But—”

Sarah hugs her. Helena is just her shadow, so there shouldn’t be anything to her – but. There they are. In her dreaming mind Sarah knows exactly how this hug feels, but she also knows that when she wakes up she’ll lose it. She’ll remember, probably, that Helena is trembling. She’ll remember that Helena’s wings feel like fingers lightly resting on her back when they wrap around the both of them.

“Now we are together,” Helena says.

Sarah says nothing. _You’re nothing to me_ , that’s her line. If she fights hard enough she won’t say it. She knows for a fact it isn’t true.

\--

A Snapchat of a daisy chain put on a deer skull. Caption: _ARE YOU SLEEPING BETTER_

A snapchat of Sarah’s face, close-up, unamused but lacking undereye bags. Caption: _yeah_

\--

In Sarah’s dream she is Helena, running towards Sarah. She knows that Sarah is out there, and that Sarah needs her, and that she needs Sarah. She also knows that she’s Sarah, which makes sense to her with her eyes closed.

Her shadow meets her at the end of the dream, where the lights are just starting to go dark. The music is still going, even though Sarah can’t hear it. She knows it’s there. Helena looks at her, head tilted to the side, and offers a hand. Sarah reaches out and takes it, and – Helena flaps her wings and lifts them out of the dream. The world is a kaleidoscope of memories.

 _Where do you want to go?_ Helena doesn’t say.

 _Anywhere_ , Sarah doesn’t say. The word doesn’t come out of her mouth, but they go there anyways.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
